Chapter 5 Learning from the international land reform experience
3 Country reviews
3.2 The Philippines
3.2.1 Brief background
Like Brazil, the Philippines has a highly unequal pattern of landownership. A small political elite, closely linked to successive conservative regimes and trans- national companies, controls extensive commercial landholdings and estates, most involving land leased for nominal rents from the State.

The history of land reform in the Philippines has been a turbulent one. By the mid-1990s, the Philippines had witnessed 11 agrarian reform programmes. In recent years, issues of access to land, combined with rural livelihood conditions, have gained in importance as:

  • fifty-six percent of the population are rural and are directly or indirectly dependent on agriculture for their livelihood;
  • half of the rural population live below the poverty line, providing labour to the large estates, and accounting for two-thirds of the country's poor; and
  • a minority of the rural population is able to cultivate small plots of their own, many as sharecroppers, but more than half of the total agricultural population in the late 1980s consisted of landless labourers (Riedinger 1990).

The persistent widespread rural poverty in the Philippines is partially related to the dependence of rural households on inferior resource bases such as upland areas, and is aggravated by the lack of alternative rural employment. Extremely biased landholding patterns persist. Traditional landowning families have managed to retain power in the countryside through a network of patron-client relations and political alliances. Several large foreign and national corporations occupy the most fertile land, and their position is protected by the liberal free-market policies of the government (Ghimire 1999).

The agriculture sector continues to play a significant role in the economy in terms of direct contribution to production, employment and farmers' income. It accounts for about 22% of gross domestic product and 16% of export income, and remains the most important source of employment, providing income to 43% of the labour force. Agricultural policies have given priority to the agricultural export-oriented commodity producers, dominated by a small proportion of large-scale landowners (Lourie, undated).

Evolution of land reform in the Philippines

1960s: Upgrading of sharecropping arrangements to leasehold tenancies.

1970s: Marcos-era reforms focused on rice and corn land. Holdings of more than 7ha were to be purchased and parcelled out to individual tenants who would then pay off the value of the land over a 15-year period. The programme was widely regarded as a failure.

1988: President Aquino introduced the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Programme (CARP), implemented by the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR). In terms of the new Constitution, provisions for ‘voluntary land sharing' and just compensation were included. Under CARP, all farmlands, private and public, were to be subject to reform, through either redistribution or the securing of tenure rights. CARP included a range of means for land acquisition and transfer: Operation Land Transfer focused on tenanted rice and corn lands. Under this programme, land is purchased directly by the State, at market-related prices and allocated to tenants. Voluntary Land Transfer is a policy promoted by the World Bank in which landless people enter into direct negotiations with landowners, and pay a market- related price without support from the State. Where neither of these mechanisms is effective, the State may resort to compulsory purchase at a price below market rates.

1990s: The programme initially became bogged down and DAR was unable to spend its budget. The bulk of lands actually redistributed were government-owned properties, leaving the holdings of large landowners virtually intact.

1992–2000: The Ramos government actively implemented neo-liberal reforms, with the intention of encouraging economic growth and raising the performance of the industrial sector. These reforms were continued under President Estrada after 1998 and led to a more explicit shift in emphasis to high- value crops together with efforts to increase foreign direct investment as well as foreign exchange. State support for low-value, high-volume crops was increasingly withdrawn with its bias being in favour of high-value export crops and merchandise exports. The country's agricultural exports have a significant impact on the implementation of land reform and the selection of crops which beneficiaries are encouraged to cultivate, and subsequently on the nature and extent of the support they receive from the State.

2000s: By 2004, an estimated 5.9 million hectares of private and public land, or half of the country's farmland, had been redistributed to 3 million rural poor households, or two-fifths of the agricultural population (Feranil 2005).